SpaceX has landed on the West Coast for the first time [Updated]

10:35pm ET Update: On Sunday night, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket took off as scheduled, and ascended into space. After about three minutes, the second stage carried its payload onward, toward a successful deployment of the SAOCOM 1A satellite into a Sun synchronous orbit.

After it separated from the second stage, the first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket arrested its forward movement, and began falling back toward Earth. It, too, found success in landing at a new site north of Los Angeles. This marked the first time a Falcon 9 rocket had landed on the West Coast, and was SpaceX’s 30th landing of a first stage overall.

Ars had photographer Trevor Mahlmann on site for the historic landing, and we will post his photographs after he collects his remote cameras.

Original post: The US Air Force has a message for residents of Santa Barbara, Ventura, and San Luis Obispo counties—do not be alarmed on Sunday night around 7:30pm local time if you hear a loud noise. That’s just the sonic boom of a rocket’s first stage, returning from space, and landing for the first time ever at site along the West Coast of California.

On Sunday night, SpaceX is scheduled to launch a Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, which is a couple of hours north of Los Angeles. While the company has landed several first stage boosters on a drone ship offshore from California, until now it has not attempted to land at a site along the coast. But now it has completed the “Landing Zone 4” facility and received the necessary federal approvals for rockets to make a vertical landing there.

For long time employees of the Hawthorne, Calif.-based company there must be some satisfaction in this. More than a decade ago, when SpaceX sought to begin launching its Falcon 1 rocket, the company asked the Air Force for permission to launch from Vandenberg. But the military and some of the companies using the facility to launch national security missions, including Lockheed Martin and Boeing, looked coolly upon the requests from SpaceX. Now SpaceX has built a landing zone on the former site of Space Launch Complex 4W, where Titan rockets built by Lockheed were previously launched.